Politics

Wi-Fi Planet Keynote: Wi-Fi vs. Telcos — continued

Isenberg proposed four scenarios for the internet's future: Competition, Telco-topia, Rethinking "natural monopoly", and Customer-topia.

• In "Competition, as envisioned by the 1996 Telecom Act" every customer loses because they have a choice between different but indistinguishable straw-sized connections to the backbone.
  
  
• In "Telco-topia" the customer has a choice between a fatter (10 Mbps?) wired pipe and a 3G wireless pipe. "There is a little improvement, but there is no competition."
  
  
• In "Re-thinking natural monopoly" a re-regulated Internet removes the bottleneck, but government is directly involved and private industry is eliminated from Internet provision. It's "a wisely-run, well-regulated monopoly that gets it. The Bell system was a wisely run system that gave us the best phone network in the world. You can have a well-regulated monopoly that gets it. Stockholm did this."
  
  
• In "Customer-topia" the backbone connects to a wired and wireless cloud that connects to customers. This is ideal but not easily achieved, and even WISP readers may not like it. "Our APs and devices eliminate the access business. Customer-owned networks take over the access business, and I think this is the future."

It's challenging to build. "It takes smart people to unwire the stupid network."

Conclusion
In the Q&A, Isenberg explained that the scenario planning approach is not about picking one scenario, but using the scenarios to clarify the import of current events. "You shouldn't choose. I would rather hold all four in mind and see how laws and technology drag our future towards one or the other scenario."

Asked about the ideal network design, he pointed to Tim Shepard's 1995 MIT doctoral thesis, Decentralized Channel Management in Scalable Multihop Spread-Spectrum Packet Radio Networks (83 pages, .pdf, available for free from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science).

Of the mesh ideal, Isenberg said, "in this scenario, each CPE buy improves the network. It's mostly organic growth. Forcing accumulated capital to build the network is where the 1996 Act stumbled. The ILECs fought to avoid funding competitors."

Asked about WiMAX, he said that it depends on whether the spectrum for it is licensed or unlicensed. Licensed spectrum could usher in the telco-topia, while unlicensed spectrum could usher in the customer-topia.

Telcos, he noted, have not managed wireless well. "T-Mobile is horrible. They would rather have a network riddled with security problems and have network access than solve the problems."

In response to a follow up question asking whether he really believed the FCC could kill competition, he based his answer on the FCC's 911 decision. "Martin's first act as FCC Chair is so clueless, it could happen tomorrow."

—End